Marion Agnew

The specific day that's like a command: March 4th. Thank you, Peggy of Otowi Station Bookstore . Here are the two shots I used for my family's calendar in March. If you've only been here in the summer, it's hard to imagine scenes like this. Which is why I include so many winter shots.

As I mentioned last week , I'm vacationing. (Strange concept for a writer.) While I'm gone, I'm sharing photos from the calendar I create for my family every year. I should mention that, being a word person, I often include words with these shots. In the past, I've used poems that were meaningful to my mother and grandmother, and excerpts from various other bits of writing that my mother left behind. This year, I used a quote for M. Scott Momaday, which you can read here . I divided the last three statements on the page among the twelve months of the year.

I live in a spot that's near and dear to me and my siblings, so every year their Christmas present from me is a calendar. The old-fashioned, paper kind. It's retro! This month, I'm taking a bit of vacation and thought I'd share some of the calendar photos here in the meantime. (You can share, too -- just link to this, please.) January's sunrise shot, taken in September, 2011.

In the mailbox yesterday: That, my friends, is the cover of the South Dakota Review, issue 49.3, which contains my story "Walking Out." South Dakota Review is going through what it calls "an ambitious transitional phase," so now would be a really good time to subscribe or submit ! Of course, you should read a sample issue before submitting. Why not this one ?? On the "subscribe" page, you'll find that the "most current" issue is only $10. Less than the cost of a movie ticket, and many more hours of entertainment. Thanks, South Dakota Review!

Last week, I was in the throes of updating and revising this website and didn't post anything up front here. I'm still mid-throe, as it were, but meanwhile, here's something to mull over. Last week, the generous and talented Graham Strong , Thunder Bay writer and novelist, directed his blog readers here , to read about how I take crappy photos and yet manage to learn writing lessons from them. This week, I give you those links to Graham in part because I appreciate his generosity and in part because he's a fellow suffer-er of the vicissitudes of country living (wells in particular). But also, I've been thinking about his novel-o-meter and "journaling the journey" approach to this novel-writing thing. I'm glad he's doing it because it's interesting to watch. So I encourage you go to over there and click around a bit. As a professional editor and writer of things business and educational and technical, for which clients pay me, I must be ...

As part of my daily "suffer for 25 minutes" discipline, I'm going through the bazillions of digital photos I've taken. I'm also struggling a bit with several works in progress. They're in revision, as in re-vision, as in "Where is this thing going?" Not to mention, "Why won't it get there more easily, for crying out loud?" I was mulling this over while deleting fuzzy image after fuzzy image, and I happened on a couple of photos that gave me useful ways to think about these recalcitrant works. Whoa, dark. So maybe the answer is shining some light on the characters. What's important to them? What do they want? It's not outside the realm of possibility that I'm putting a heavy symbolic burden on those poor people, and all those symbols are obscuring the real point of the story. In this case, I need to get the actual story part out first, and leave consideration of the difference between good and evil for later. Like, ma...

Yes, this has something to do with writing. In fact it's advice about writing advice, which feels very something-or-other. Postmodern . Meta. But it starts with cornbread. I've been making a lot of cornbread lately. The last two loaves of bread we bought became science experiments before we could eat them, so we haven't been buying it. Therefore, when my body says "feed me something plain, please," we don't have the "ingredients" for toast. But cornbread works. Plus it's relatively easy to make. Today is a howling-wind day, and I am suffering (and I do mean suffering) from a cold (though I imagine those around me are suffering more from my suffering), so today seemed like a good day to make cornbread. Except that because of said cold, we haven't been grocery shopping. So our stash of cornmeal is low. Instead of the 3/4 cup of cornmeal, I had only 1/2 cup. "Excellent," I said (not really). "I will simply 2/3 the entire recipe....